


It came from the tumblr archives: A horror film in five parts

by deliverusfromsburb



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Game Over Timeline, Gen, Jade Harley's hard knock life, Trans Calliope, all except the very last which is retcon but got jossed anyway, god some of this stuff is four years old, i refuse to put this in the tag for that timeline bc I hate it with all my heart, talk about a trip down memory lane, trans Roxy (indirectly referenced)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-23
Updated: 2016-11-23
Packaged: 2018-09-01 15:04:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8628919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deliverusfromsburb/pseuds/deliverusfromsburb
Summary: As I continue dredging my tumblr fic tags, this is a dumping ground for a bunch of short stuff that I don't deem long enough for its own post. Items may be added if necessary. Current content summary: Jade puts up with all the crap the narrative throws at her from multiple angles. Roxy introduces Calliope to gender. Davesprite is there.





	1. Jade

The power goes off with no warning and cuts your pesterchum conversation off mid-sentence. You have to scour your basement and climb down an access hatch to find the problem. The volcano acts up sometimes like an upset stomach, growling deep down and belching up surges of heat that fry your wiring down to glowing cinders. This is why you hate geothermal power, but you are not old enough or steady enough or maybe even rich enough to convert your entire island to nuclear energy. So you will continue fixing what is broken in small pieces.

You have to unscrew a glass panel to get at the burned out wires. Some of the metals are sensitive and could corrode if exposed to air too long, but you’ll be fast. You’re not helpless after all!

You wake up.

It’s disorienting - it’s always disorienting - and your mind has to go through the same checklist every time. _Where am I? What was I doing? Was it important?_

You get a yes on the last one and pull yourself up, your face sore from being pressed against rough concrete. Your vision blurs a little because you really shouldn’t be breathing the air this far down for more than a few minutes - _and whose fault is that_ \- but you can see you’ve been out too long. Many of the wires in front of you are dull and pitted with corrosion. A job that might’ve taken you a few minutes will now take hours.

How could you be so _stupid_? You don’t even want to know what your grandpa would say if he could see you now. Probably that you need to do much better. And you will. You’re coughing and your eyes are watering and your stomach hurts, but it’s your own damn fault and you have to do it because there’s no one else.

Today’s not the day you die, anyway. You know that much.

You crawl out of the hatch two hours later. You reek of sulfur and your skin prickles with the beginnings of heat rash, but the power is back on. There are three pesterchum messages asking if you’re ok and you say _of course silly :)_ to each and every one of them. Because you are.

And even though no one can see you, you practice smiling.


	2. Roxy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I like the idea that Calliope and Caliborn started identifying the way they do after learning about human concepts of gender. That doesn’t really hold up since alt Callie uses she/her and calls Caliborn her brother but a) universal translators could be in play and b) I have a long and proud tradition of ignoring canon at this point.

UU messages you when you’re in the middle of shaving your legs. The phone vibrates and wobbles on the edge of the tub (you should really stop putting it there) and you lunge for it. The razor slips, slicing down your shin. “Dammit,” you grumble. The cut’s not deep, but the sight of your blood swirling down the drain doesn’t cheer you up.  
UU must have their viewport on, because their first message is apologetic.

UU: i’m sorry if i startled yoU.

UU: are yoU alright?

TG: im fine

TG: just a lil razor nick it happens all the time

TG: 1 of the perils of the job im fraid

UU: all the time? yoU do this ritUal often?

TG: sure

TG: gotta keep these puppies smooth n shiny

TG: evn if theres no1 here 2 appreciate them

You pull a leg out of the tub and stroke it langorously like a model in a razor blade commercial, so that uu can stand in for your absent admirers.

TG: style counts

UU: oh, i see. yoU’re removing hair.

TG: um

TG: ye

TG: guess ur 2 young for puberty 2 hit u w/ its evil unstoppable downloads like 2 much hair + emotions

TG: unlesssss

TG: there is something ELSE going on w/ ur quaint ignorance of human norms

TG: (im callin the x files rite the fuck now)

TG: (jk <3 <3)

UU: my yoUth may be part of it, yes.

UU: my body will certainly Undergo changes as i get older. u_u

TG: ill let u off w ur mysterious nonanswers today

TG: but know that u r only piquing my interest

TG: one day i will fill all the gaps like a wily gap fillin detective

TG: or maybe stonemason would b a more applicable career choice here

TG: but 4 now ill respect ur privacy

UU: forgive my own intrUsion.

UU: and my ignorance.

UU: do yoU not like having hairs there?

UU: it seems rather exciting and exotic to me!

TG: eh

TG: its kinda expected 4 girls 2 not have em

TG: chalk it up 2 whatever powers that b who were comin up with this stuff

TG: also i like em all shiny and clean

TG: u can run ur fingers up and down and theyre sooo smooth <3

UU: what exactly are “girls” sUpposed to do?

UU: yoU and yoUr friends have mentioned concepts like that and i’m intrigUed, but i don’t qUite follow.

TG: lol ok this is where i have a reallllllly hard time not subjecting u 2 the rolal inquisition

TG: even batterbitch the alien invader runs around bein a sexy lady i thought trolls knew abt this stuff

TG: r all troll aliens not alike

UU: er…

UU: coUld i plead the fifth?

TG: k

TG: dont think the constitutions much 2 look at at this point but we gotta hold fast to the inviolable rules of our nation like due process and havin at least 5 pistols on hand at all times

TG: ill pretend ur some other mysterious alien whose landed on my room askin 2 b taken 2 our leader and im filling u in on this earth shit called GENDER

UU: gender? what’s that?

TG: 4 words

TG: gender

TG: is a bitch

UU: :U

TG: idk its like

TG: somethin u feel inside?

TG: is kinda hard 2 explain u just know

TG: sometimes u know rite away sometimes it takes a lil more soul searching but its something about how u r

TG: i know im a girl

TG: and there r certain things every1 expects girls 2 do

TG: ofc basically every1 is dead as shit but ud be surprised how convincin the precedent of loads of dead ppl can b

TG: for 1 thing they outnumber us

TG: in fact a bunch of those dead mothereffers would have some choice words 4 me for sayin im a girl at all but fuck those dead guys in particular

TG: i dont HAVE 2 do those things 2 b a girl

TG: i always am bc i know i am

TG: i dont always have the energy either for ALL the primping and prepping and whatev and some of it im chuckin out the window as relics of a crappy civilization anyway

TG: dont gotta follow all the rules im a rebel

TG: but i do like 2 do some of it

TG: it makes me feel nice

TG: makin myself look cute n stuff

UU: yoU’re always cUte! ^u^

TG: lol thx

TG: ur the best

uu: the makeUp you wear, is that a girl thing too?

TG: can b

TG: usually accordin 2 the dead dread rulemakin authority

TG: but not always

UU: i’ve been experimenting with it myself.

UU: … it makes me feel better aboUt the way i look. u~u

UU: i’m still learning thoUgh, and my sibling gets angry when i practice.

TG: im sure u look adorbs no matter wut

TG: and fuck the haters wut do they no

UU: it’s kind of yoU to say so.

TG: i mean it evn if ive nvr seen a pic

TG: ur cute its obvs just from how u talk the cuteness shines thru

TG: tell u wut ill link u 2 some good tutorials

TG: or i can make a vid of myself and be ur v special makeup tutor

UU: that soUnds lovely!

UU: so… really anything you do qUalifies as a “girl thing”, simply dUe to the fact that yoU are doing it!

UU: am i Understanding this correctly?

TG: yup sounds about right

TG: thats a good way of looking at it i like it

TG: follow my example 2 learn the mystic girlways im the prototypical xample rite here

TG: the IDEAL form

TG: platos got nothin on me

TG: not that hed kno much about girls if 1 bit him on the ass which several prolly wanted 2

TG: castin my sickass shadows on the cave wall over here

UU: yoU set a marveloUs example.

UU: i wonder…

The chat client says they’re typing, then idle, then typing again. You’re used to this. Not all of your friends type as rapid fire as you do, and UU is almost as likely as Dirk to deliver paragraphs. You set the phone down and prod your cut. The bleeding has stopped, but it stings. You’ve gotten good enough that you almost never nick yourself, even on the tricky bits on your face, especially since you try to be sober while flailing around with razors. There’s probably a metaphor in all this, and Dirk has probably talked about it at length already. For all that he’s as tight-assed as Jane sometimes, he’s the one who gets it best. Your experiences aren’t the same, obviously, but they’re the closest you’ve got. Too bad he’s a zillion miles away.  

Your phone buzzes. UU has finally finished their message. You’re expecting one of their exposition fairy monologues, but instead they’ve written

UU: do yoU think i coUld be a girl, too?

You look at the message for a moment and then smile wide enough that uu should be able to see through the viewport.

UU, you type, u can be any damn thing u want


	3. Jade

Jade: (Try to) Sleep

You have the dream again. That dream, the one where you wake up with a scream trapped in your throat and stumble to the mirror to make sure you have irises and pupils and there aren’t two blank spheres staring back at you.

You rest your forehead against the glass, breathing hard. You’re not dead. You’re not dead. You were but you weren’t. That’s in the past now. Get yourself together, Harley. You’re way too old for this.

You wish you could always dream in the bubbles, but the afterlife fizzles in and out like a badly tuned radio and your brain fills in the gaps with horror stories. Seeing yourself with a dead girl’s eyes isn’t close to the worst of it. You don’t want to sleep again right now – you don’t want to sleep again ever, but biology disagrees – so you walk down the dark hallway toward the kitchen. To your surprise, the light is on already. You hang back in the hallway for a moment before forcing yourself to keep going. You don’t feel like talking, but you need that coffee if you’re going to pull an all-nighter for the third time this week.

You walk in wearing your best don’t talk to me expression along with your pajamas. Davesprite is sitting at the table and nods at you. “Couldn’t sleep?”

You sigh and resign yourself to at least a little conversation. “Bad dreams.”

“Same.” He’s doodling on the tabletop with one finger, leaving a faint orange glow behind. “John’s making hot chocolate if you want to wait up.”

“He’s awake?” Even as you say it, you remember the lines around your brother’s eyes, the new tightness in his jaw, and feel terrible. He saw his father dead. He saw Rose spiral into an abyss of darkness and grief. There’s no reason he wouldn’t have nightmares too.

You just figured they were one more thing you didn’t talk about, like the way Davesprite looks at you and John sometimes like you’re the ghosts, or the time when John alchemized hundreds of harlequin statues and smashed every last one to porcelain shards. You pretend everything is all right, and if you pretend long enough, everything will be okay. This is a game you’ve played before.

The game you’re playing now is a whole lot worse.

Something clatters in the other room. “Gang’s all here,” Davesprite says, and adds a few more scribbles to the table. He’s managed to make a decent imitation of comic sans. That’s dedication.

You sit down next to him with a groan as John comes in. “Hey,” he says, not looking at all surprised to see you. There are three cups of hot chocolate on the tray too. He plunks one down in front of you and sits down on your other side.

“How’d you know I was coming?” you ask, wrapping your fingers around the warm ceramic.

“The breeze gave me a heads up.” John hesitates and then adds, “I heard you earlier.”

You screamed after all. You sigh and take a sip. It’s sweet enough to jolt you awake, and you feel a sudden rush of appreciation for little brothers who put too much sugar into everything. “How often are you two up?”

John gulps down his own hot chocolate, not looking at you. “Once or twice a week, I think.”

Davesprite rustles his feathers and mutters something that sounds suspiciously like “Every night”, so you don’t press it.

“It’s not too bad for me,” you say, because, under bright lights and with the scent of hot chocolate in the air, it’s almost true. And what would be the point, anyway? “At least we know where to go if we’re having a bad time again.”

“Sure,” Davesprite says. “Group bonding. Like the Breakfast Club, only fucked up and sad.”

John frowns. “Isn’t the Breakfast Club already fucked up and sad?”

“Well yeah, but they get a happy ending.”

“We’ll get one too,” you say, but less emphatically than usual. You’re sleepy and scared and tired of dying over and over again, even if it is only in your dreams.

No one has anything to say for a while after that. You drain the last dregs of hot chocolate from your mug and stare at the graffiti on the table until John clears his throat.

“Anyone want to watch a movie?”

In the end, you drift off on the sofa with the Ghostbusters theme playing in your head and John’s feet on your lap, and this time you don’t dream once.


	4. Davesprite

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Didn't think this was bad enough to call for the whole-work graphic violence warning, but there's some description of death and gore in this one. Also, brief mention of Rose drinking.

Time travel has a learning curve.

You don’t start right away. After you’ve buried the charred remains John’s denizen left behind, after you’ve watched Jade’s viewport dissolve into static with the notice ‘connection lost’ flashing across the screen, after you realize two of your friends are dead and not coming back, both of you fall apart. Rose logs off for a few hours and comes back with fingers full of typos, so drunk you can practically smell the alcohol through the screen. You walk outside with a shitty broken sword and fight – slice hordes of imps into showers of grist, fell ogres like hulking mutant trees, slash at steel I beams and churning gears until your blunted sword jars from your hand to the ground and you follow it. But once you’ve both finished your theatrical fuck yous to a game that doesn’t give a shit, you work things out. Hero of Time. Time travel. It’s your job to fix things. Simple as that. There’s a bright red RESET button with your face on it somewhere, and all you need to do is figure out how to press it.

After a few days of messing with alchemy, you’ve got something you think might work. Turntables – no, timetables – weird-ass floating disks that give off a low hum mostly in your own mind.

“Forward or back?” you ask. Another thing you’ve alchemized is a pair of computer shades that pick up your voice for you. Handy – you think your fingers would have fallen off by now from all the typing otherwise.

“Back,” Rose says. “That’s our goal, isn’t it? Don’t go all the way though.”

“I know.” She’s given you that lecture a thousand times and Seer knows best, after all.

(Most of the time, anyway. One day she doesn’t answer any of your messages and you find her on her planet collapsed in a sticky mess of broken bottles. She mumbles feverishly with her head lolling on your shoulder, and as you carry her to her room, some of the words don’t sound like English. After you tuck her in – on her side, you know the drill – her skin looks gray almost, but that’s probably your imagination.

The shadows cling to your shoes when you walk out.)

“Back it is.” You set the tables spinning; there’s a rushing noise in your ears, a feeling of suspended motion –

“Forward or back?” you ask.

“Back,” Rose says. “That’s our – wait.”

“What?” You fiddle with one of the tables, frowning up at the sky in case she’s got her viewport on. She’s given you lectures a thousand times about being careful, but being careful isn’t going to fix this game. If she’s found another reason to stall, you swear –

“Don’t go.” Her voice, even filtered through speakers, is strained. “And, oh god. Just stay where you are. Don’t look.”

“What the hell are you-?” you start, until you turn around. Then you see it, and it takes all your years of self-control to keep from throwing up.

It’s you. Same clothes, same face, a cracked pair of turntables broken at your feet. Something has slashed you at waist level. You’re almost in two pieces and spilling out your contents like a broken trashbag…

You lose the battle and throw up.

It looks like time travel is a little more complicated than you thought.

Eventually you learn the rules. With a Seer guiding you, you craft elegant stable loops reaching back and linking hands with each other, making sure you’ll always come back home, making sure you’ll stay alive.

You screw up plenty too. You learn the shape of your heart, the arch of your spine, the curve of your ribcage. You know intimately what you look like burnt, broken, and torn apart. You could paint the colors of your insides without looking.

You don’t give up. You want to, sometimes. But then you wake up screaming from dreams where you’re running through the twisting passageways of Typheus’s palace or bashing your palms helplessly against the computer screen and you can’t help, it’s not working, you need more time. You remember the way John lay twisted and small and broken when you found him, the look on Jade’s face when the meteor was coming and you and Rose couldn’t even hold her hand. You don’t have a choice. You are the Knight of Time and you will fix this, even if it kills you a thousand times.

The idea hits you one day when you’re screaming at Calsprite, thinking it might be worth it to end up doomed and dying just so you won’t have to deal with his shit anymore. You’re making a mental note to warn your past self to prototype something else, anything else, before you get offed in whatever way Skaia dreams up when it hits you. You message Rose, half enthusiastic, half horrified (it’s a fucked up idea even in this game, and you’re not sure you want it to work) and ask what she thinks.

“It might not save you,” she says.

“I know that.” You’re sitting on one of the beams under your house, kicking your feet over lava and empty air. You’ve seen what that bubbling liquid can do to flesh and bone – corpse disposal method, can’t leave dead Daves lying around, that shit’s unhygienic, you ’d fail the FDA inspection for sure – and it looks painful. “But it might buy me some time. And hey, you said we should try to learn more about the game. Sprites are supposed to be the wise spirity assholes who keep you in line, right? I can go all Obi Wan Kenobi on that shit. Tell myself when I feel any disturbances in the force. Like if a thousand troll jackasses screamed fuck you and were suddenly silenced.”

“Mine hasn’t been very helpful,” she says, not bothering to acknowledge your nightmare of a prototype.

“That’s because you threw in a dead cat. What were you thinking? He could guide you to the best off brand tuna? Give you life advice in LOLZ Cat captions?”

She ignores you, and you imagine her biting her lip, trying to See into the past’s future or future’s past or something equally twisted up and halfway nonexistent, working out whether this will save the game or fuck it up even more.

“It can’t hurt,” she says at last.

As it turns out, it hurts a lot.


	5. Jade

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am a card carrying member of the 'if the author was going to torture Jade, he should have at least considered how it would impact her character' club. I usually don't bother acknowledging the retcon timeline in my fanworks because why invite evil into your home, but I did this in protest, which immediately got jossed anyway. Ah well.

“I didn’t know what Typheus meant,” John says, and you know that’s the closest he’ll ever come to an apology.

He stuttered and stammered when you first told him what your journey had been like, what he’d made it like. “I had to,” he said. “I saved you all. _My_ Jade would be grateful.”

He’d stopped after that – looking half guilty, half afraid – because you think he’s a little scared of what he made you. He’d expected the old Jade Harley. They all had. The girl with a ready smile and a practiced laugh, curls bouncing as she stood up on tiptoes because she couldn’t hold the excitement in on the flats of her feet. Not someone worn lean from weapons practice with a mess of tangled hair, shadows of the wolf lingering in her face even after they broke the Empress’s hold.

John can’t take all the blame for that, though. You did it to yourself. If there’s one thing your childhood taught you, it’s that everything needs to have a use. You’ve always had a fondness for beautiful things – long dresses floating around you like gossamer, flowers with delicate petals curling up toward the sun, the elegant way physics takes the world around you and breaks it down into strings of numbers. But useful is what keeps you alive. You had to gut some of your grandfather’s contraptions to keep the most important machines running, and you blocked off portions of your home that you didn’t have the energy to keep intact. In the end, useful is what matters.

And you’re not useful enough. You couldn’t save them. When your world – or John’s world, to be exact, the Land of Wind and Shade, a small blue ball the size of a cantaloupe – exploded, all you could do was mourn. So you made yourself stronger. Earlier, you’d played with reality with a fascinated eye for how the laws of the universe bent and shattered at your touch. Now you work at it for real. You dig out practice weapons, exercising exhausted muscles while John’s Nanna fills the silence with riddles that might be comforting, if you had time to puzzle out what they mean. The part of your brain that was prototyped spits out numbers that keep climbing higher, but you have nothing to compare them too. You’re still not good enough to save what really matters.

“Now I know how you feel,” you tell Davesprite once.

He shrugs. He and John avoid you a lot of the time, or maybe you avoid them. It’s hard to tell. You’re all caught in an uncertain pattern of orbits and collisions, not sure what to make of each other, afraid to admit that you’ve been shortchanged on deals you never wanted to make. Whenever you talk to one of them, it feels like something broken grating inside your chest. Painful, but at least it’s motion.

“I thought it’d be easier on this side of things,” he says, and you see the years he never had rest heavy on his face.

These are the facts. On April thirteenth, a tower fell on Jade Harley and smashed her flat. It squeezed the air from her lungs and crushed her skull and drove her ribcage in on itself. It’s a tossup what killed her first. You don’t think it matters.

Almost three years earlier and yet somehow afterward, a planet shattered and turned another Dave Strider’s atoms into ash. John Egbert stayed dead, Heroically, unfairly, because another John in another world made a choice to keep him that way.

Denizens have no hearts. They cannot empathize, or pity, or love. They name a price, and you pay it. You don’t Choose based on fairness, or kindness, or beauty. You Choose based on what is useful, and then you learn to live with it.

Sometimes John sits with you and Roxy and describes things from the life you had together. It wouldn’t work with anyone else, you think, but John’s words are so vivid that you can almost pretend that they’re memories. Roxy gives them shape, pulling objects out of thin air: a dress, a potted plant, a birthday cake. A few times, he tries to describe a photo album. Roxy has it down to an art by now. After a few moments, she conjures the bound volume and places it in your hands. You let its weight pull your arms down for a moment. Then you open it, but the pages are blank. They always are.


End file.
